Get some sleep: Continuous Data Protection (CDP)

One of the indirect benefits of using a remote hosting provider is the ability to tap into ancillary services like Continuous Data Protection (CDP) that safeguards your data using the latest backup & restore technologies.
Traditionally IT departments running their own on-premise solutions have considered backup and disaster recovery to be two separate functions often handled by two different departments. This may have meant using a tape-based backup or a disk-based replication method, respectively.
With the rising surge of interest in cloud-based hosting to mitigate complexity, cut down costs and streamline business operations, there has also been the blossoming of new CDP technologies, which aims to protect your mission-critical data.
CDP unifies the goal of managing both backup and disaster recovery in one technical swoop. For instance, WestHost offers CDP as part of their preferred and business plans.
CDP allows rapid restoration of data in the face of some unplanned event or downtime.   While the technology is not exactly new it is becoming increasingly sophisticated and powerful, allowing hosting companies to offer this service to smaller SMBs, as well as larger enterprises, at much lower costs.
“Technologies such as compression and deduplication can decrease data traffic and significantly reduce bandwidth requirements and overall costs,” said eWeek.

Information System Security defines CDP as a process that let’s organizations continuously capture or track data modifications and stores changes independent of the primary data, enabling recovery from specific points in the past. CDP systems may be block, file-, or application-based and can provide fine granularities of restorable objects to infinitely variable points in time.
It is also becoming very popular in protecting the massive email threads generated in systems such as Exchange Server or other mission-critical email collaboration portals.
“New granular recovery technologies have emerged that enable mail messages, mailboxes, and folders to be restored individually without having to restore an entire email database, and without separate and redundant mailbox backups,” said Information System Security.
“In an Exchange environment, for example, only a single-pass full or incremental backup of Exchange is required, which dramatically decreases the time required to protect all mailboxes while also reducing the backup storage requirement. “
“In some situations, continuous data protection will require less space on backup media (usually disk) than traditional backup. Most continuous data protection solutions save byte or block-level differences rather than file-level differences. This means that if you change one byte of a 100 GB file, only the changed byte or block is backed up. Traditional incremental and differential backups make copies of entire files.”
If you are currently experiencing severe pain points dealing with data replication and disaster recovery you may find hosting that includes CDP is just what the doctor ordered!